The people they copied it from would.

If you got enough (wo)manpower you can also do a cleanroom RE using a decompiler - one team decompiles and writes documentation about how the chip works, the second team writes a driver based on that doc.

Does this way to write an implementation have a name?

Chinese wall

>Espressif Systems is a Chinese company and probably stole half the code in the firmware anyways.

So if an entity is Chinese we are sure they are thiefs.

The thing is, China as a culture does have a completely different attitude towards intellectual property. For them, copying is not theft, it's acknowledge of something's quality. Andrew "bunnie" Huang has written (at least) two articles with more details [1][2].

[1] https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/2014/from-gongkai-to-open...

[2] https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/2013/the-12-gongkai-phone...

> copying is not theft, it's acknowledge of something's quality

This is a common misconception. It is true that they don't think it is theft once it's widely available (even in underground community), but it's not because "copying is acknowledge of something's quality". This is one of the usual excuses.

A better phrasing would be: modern (post-1980s) Chinese people [1] care more about who is able to build the thing, not who is able to invent / design. They happily (and knowingly) steal your design and after a few iterations build it better and think it's totally legit because you failed to prevent them from stealing your design and you also can't build it better.

And the annoying part is, turns out, after copying all they can steal they surprisingly can invent, too.

[1] It's not yet a culture

Isn't this exactly the MO of post-war Japanese industry? Copy everything from the west for the local market, then improve and make it better and cheaper then seel it in their market for profits?

Also the MO of early US industrialism. Copy everything from the UK and Europe, make it better and cheaper, apply it to local conditions, etc, etc. Only start supporting international patents when you've got lots of patents that warrant protection.

See also: Nintendo and IP protection.

Copying isn't theft (though it may still be illegal). Theft is "dishonest appropriation of property belonging to another with the intention to permanently deprive the other of it."

So if I steal your wallet, your phone or your car that's theft because you no longer have access to it and I do.

If I copy a book, a CD, a DVD, a document or a chip the original owner still has it. That doesn't mean there's no prejudice or that it's legal but it's not theft.

First paragraph:

"This will enable features that the current, closed source ESP32 Wi-Fi implementation does not have, for example 802.11s mesh networking. It will also improve the auditability of the code."

Mesh is such a cool technology that seems to be reserved to high end HW, and bringing it to ESP32 would be amazing!